A Room of One’s Own

Rory reads this 1929 book by Virginia Woolf on the bus to Hartford. A Room of One’s Own is a long essay based on a series of lectures that Woolf gave to female students at two women’s colleges at Cambridge University in 1928. It combines fiction and non-fiction to discuss a history of women’s writing, and to argue for a place for women within the literary tradition.

Woolf states that for a woman to write fiction, she must have a modest income, and a private place to write – a room of her own. This is another feminist text that Rory reads, and it seems that the aspiring journalist is already positioning herself as a woman writer. It is ironic that the book asks for women to be given a private space, as Dean intrudes on Rory’s privacy on the bus.